#MeToo

The Women’s March of January 2017 marked a new wave of resistance bringing millions of people together with a sense of common cause. This mobilization shepherded ignored voices to the fore; provoked by the trauma of a man being elected who flaunted his ability to objectify and molest women. From the greek myth of Cassandra and Apollo to Anita Hill women have not been believed when they speak out against their transgressors. The #MeToo movement of today feels like one of the ways our culture is shifting to acknowledge the experiences of many women. Each woman has a distinct personal and ancestral experience of sexual assault from the brutality of slavery, the rape and massacre of Native women, the violence and aggression that comes with colonization to stories of isolated individual incidents of rape, assault and molestation. By banding together and supporting the diverse voices of women who have been violated and abused, the abuse becomes a visible part of our culture, one we must confront. It is my hope that together we are stronger. That we as 21st century individuals are galvanized by both singular and collective histories of violence against women; that we desire to know deeply the experiences of others, to hold them up to the light in order to speak truth to a power that for centuries has gone unchallenged. Today we stand for change, for our foremothers, the struggles they endured and the work they did to lay the cornerstones of who we are today, to the bright future we imagine for our daughter’s and our daughter’s daughters.

#MeToo is a fine art photography series depicting women young and old giving voice to stories of sexual assault and abuse past and present. It includes twenty women from a diversity of backgrounds all clad in victorian style mourning dresses, a dress worn by European women during the period to connote the loss of a loved one. In this instance it is not the loss of a physical being, but the negation of the voice of women throughout history across the globe whom have been subjected to sexual violence that is referenced by the European style dress, the dress of one of the greatest colonizers in history. The seed of inspiration for this series was planted on the night of the Golden Globes when Hollywood women wore black as a collective voice of protest against the culture of sexual harassment. The #MeToo placard is a sort of reverse scarlet letter, in the case of Hester Pryne, she was made to wear the letter A and stand before a crowd, shamed for the act of adultery, here the collective impact of so many women who have a #MeToo experience is meant to bring awareness, it is a shameful history of unrepentant perpetration that we should no longer be willing to quietly endure. By depicting women of today in a dress code of the past it is my intention to demonstrate the sense of time that women have been subject to sexual abuse in hopes that we can create a cultural shift so that the experience is not perpetuated in future generations

(I recognize that this project is only moderately inclusive and that sexual assault and harassment exists for people of all genders, ages, races, classes and sexual orientations. This projects is just beginning to scratch the surface of an issue and experience that prevades the world over.)

Voices of Resistance (WIP)

Since the founding of the United States voices of resistance have given rise to concerns and movements to improve the quality of life for a greater intersection of The People. This series looks to the past to understand the struggles and gallant efforts and endurance of those who came before, to find inspiration in the work they did to lay the cornerstones of who we are today; to build a bridge of conversation between then and now in order to connect more deeply with those who were ignored and devalued in the past in order to imagine a more inclusive, brighter future for generations to come. These images revisit the lives of numerous historical figures both real and in some cases partially imagined including Harriet Tubman, Betsy Ross, Frances Willard, Ida B Wells, Frances Harper, Pandita Ramabai and Catherine Waugh McCulloch focusing on the early organizing effort of women for social change, and examining the causes and struggles for justice that have transcended time from the fight for abortion rights, voting rights, immigration rights, the right to bare arms and its fall out, to the #MeToo movement, to the thread of history that runs through the abolition of slavery to the anti-lynching movement to the civil rights movement to the Black Lives Matter campaign. Inspired by the January 2017 and 2018 Women's Marches and the current Year of the Woman as we move toward November 2018 elections, it has felt imperative to look to the past for reminders of hope, to see a timeline of change that respects the humanity of the many over the few. It is from the triumphs of history that we can imagine a more hopeful union.

Punctum

The word, punctum, as used by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida means a sting, cut, little hole - a casting of the dice, something that penetrates the skin. It is the accident that pricks, but also bruises, is poignant. This term is used as regards photographs, but it seems that it is a feeling achieved by a great variety of life experiences. We live in a world where everyday, if we allow the weight of the world in, there is the possibility of puncture. There is so much anguish to absorb, but also so much beauty. How do we live in such a way that we acknowledge the pain and suffering in the world, work to make the world a better place and find and create a space for a loving world to exist? By opening ourselves emotionally, by making ourselves vulnerable, we allow for the possibility of connection and transformation where individual growth begins a chain reaction that can be passed from one person to the next. By allowing our hearts to be squeezed, broken open, to live for a moment inside this space of amplified being, on the raw edge of life, we allow the beauty and pain of the world in, grasp at the possibility of our greater unity. Through the experiences that puncture us we find identification with others, a certain energy harnessed, captured and transferred. This project began while wandering the streets of Berlin, absorbing the history of the city and thinking about the lives that could have been had Hitler not gained power, how all that was taken away, denied, destroyed, in some way still remains. And everyday this worldly loss and destruction continues. The ether of lives cut short threads through geography, informing the lives of those who are here now, imbuing us with a responsibility to bring unlived memories to life. We are each punctured by the past and the present and perhaps it is our greatest gift that we can feel in the here and now for that is what changes us and will change the world.

Eremocine: The Age of Loneliness (Brand New Project in Progress)

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. —Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

In grappling with what it means to live in the here and now as humanity changes faster than ever, producing and consuming at greater rates by the second, I am struck by the feeling that we are racing toward our own demise. Since 1970 60% of each wild species on the planet has disappeared and although this gives us humans pause, collectively we are more interested in our own unique endeavors than the effort required to slow our extinction— believing possibly that technology will save us, that we might modify or cyborg ourselves into a future existence that could persist despite an inhospitable planet. As we “evolve” through time we create and produce both a great impact on the planet and a tremendous amount of refuse. We live amongst the detritus of our over consumption. Things that were once innovative end up in mountainous dumps, floating in the sea, preserved in museums, obsolete momentos in our homes. With a glance we look upon the past, but cast it off just as we move forward in time. I am interested in the path we have taken, how we got to where we are today through our fanciful machines, objects of wonder, botany of destruction. I am interested in the remnants, the symbols of our culture, repurposing and resurrecting them, telling the story of the beauty and destruction of what was, the great possibility of the human experiment, what we have sought to create and the tragedy of our failing as we shred limb from limb the ecosystems and biodiversity of this great planet, leaving behind fewer species, a lonelier existence on this pale blue dot.

Possibility In Multitudes

I dreamt there was a thread

It ran through each of us

Tied one to the next to the next

Crossed over and back

Forming a web

That strung us up

Together

Hovering just above the ground

We were tethered

To the here and now

Yet undone

Lifted into another time

This sense

Of being

A piece of connective tissue

In which dismantled by breath and blood

We are both made and destroyed by the lightness of being

So much possibility in our hands

And the things that firmly root us

Now we gather stories and knot threads

Seek to define something

Maybe non-human in its consciousness

Which makes our being possible

Starlings, Cedar and Sycamore

Cerulean tides

Change tumbling through and

The moon that also rises

In puddles stand our reflections

Then another

Linking us past to present

The wisp of futures

Thriving and deceased

And what spills forth is the order of things

It is the matter of timing

That unfolds our answers

And we dive and dive again

Into the eye of the storm

To stoke living from our anguish

Weightless in Time

Still Life (WIP)

Ghosts Immemorial

I remember the day, at age six, when my great-grandmother’s childhood home was torn down. It was an opulent place with ballrooms and gilded halls long abandoned for a smaller more practical house on the same property. Pre-demolition my father lead my older sister and I through the dusty halls and I gapped at the buckling floors and broken windows, imagining what it might have been like to inhabit the space between those walls. There was another house down the road where my father grew up, where I grew up spending summers, weekends and holidays and where until recently my children spent all of their Christmases. Two years ago my grandfather passed away and in his passing, this family home, this gathering place, this place of memory ceased to exist. This loss made me frantic. I had a desperation to document the place so that I might never forget it, so that my memory might be prompted by the images of a certain room or bench or tree. Now that this home, this place where I belonged, is gone I have a compelling need to document spaces slated for demolition or drastic renovation, spaces where the possible lives that passed between the walls are palpable or inspire a certain sense of possibility. In Ghosts Immemorial I aim to bring a whisp of life to spaces forgotten, abandoned, left for dead, spaces we can no longer afford to live in or maintain, spaces deemed no longer necessary for contemporary life, spaces in need of new life.

A Nursery Rhyme For You

As a child some weekends we visited my grandparents in a farmhouse of decaying grandeur in New Jersey and other weekends we’d stay home and traipse through the halls of great New York City museums. I always imagined how these places could be different, how they were a portal to another time, an imagined life. In the attic of my grandparents home there were dust covered steamer trunks filled with ballgowns while the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art offered a glimpse into the interiors of early American homes. I dreamt of wearing these ballgowns and living in a different era, but despite my dreamy nature I never got much beyond dress-up in shoddy 1970’s halloween costumes.

As the mother of two girls with fanciful imaginations in an era when unfettered childhood fantasy is interrupted or negated by an abundant access to technology I have sought to preserve and create for my daughters a little bit of the magic I longed to have brought into my own childhood while avoiding much of the contemporary child’s play market and trying to impart an honest sense of the world we live in today.

I find great inspiration in anything from fairytales to the primal relationships between humans and nature to current events. Every fairytale has a dark side, the death of a parent, the loss of a power and in an era of social and political upheaval and environmental degradation, the dreams and fantasy of a child are effected and shaped by the external forces buzzing in the world around them. In A Nursery Rhyme for You My Dear I am attempting to both create a child-like fantasy world and to allow the harshness of reality to seep in. When I make an image I am very interested in exploring it’s underbelly. It may look pretty on the outside, but perhaps there is more to it. I want to both dwell on and delete some of the darkness in any given scenario, to try on a story for size, to understand what it might be like to exist in that moment and how to learn from it, but also leave it behind, as if in a dream.

1. Coronation: Queen of the Unicorns.

2. Country Bunny.

3. Her Kingdom Come

4. How Does Your Garden Grow?

5. Heads Will Roll

6. Migration.

7. Flowers at Forty.

8. Playtime.

9. Heart of a Gardener.

10. Hunting Season.

11. Target Practice.

12. As She Stood Waiting.

13. Christmas Card of a Single Mother, Homesteader, circa 1985.

14. Sick Day in Thingvellir.

15. Shipwrecked.

16. Fairy Tales.

17. Princess & the Pea.

18. Brownie.

19. Valentine.

20. Changeling.

21. House of a Dreamer.

22. Spirit Animal.

23. No Time for Clowning Around.

24. Traveling Artist.

25. Recovery.

26. Flight of Wonder.

27. To the Top.

28. No More Monkeys Jumping on the Bed.

29. Catch & Release.

30. Bidding Farewell.

31. Waiting for Owl.

32. On Such a Winter's Day.

33. Upstairs with Iris.

Stay In Touch (WIP)

A couple of years ago I had a dream in which the first image in this series came to me. Tracking down the phones to express the anxiety of loosing touch became an obsession. In the dream my two young daughters had grown up and left home, moving on to lives of their own in which they were no longer readily available for a conversation or a snuggle. I am somebody who is notoriously bad at staying in touch, a poor communicator to boot. Ever since high school whenever I’d leave home and promise to call my parents to let them know I had arrived safely at my destination, I have succeeded in failing nine times out of ten. This shortcoming is not for lack of love or care, but more a sense of overwhelm and poor time management skills. And so, as a mother of young ones I live with the deep anxiety that when my girls are grown and have flown the coop, they too will forget to call and my heart will ache in the space of silence. I know in my heart of hearts the need for individuation, but I’m holding out hope that we’ll stay in touch. There is a part of me that feels weirdly obsessive and needy in this love or perhaps just fiercely maternal. Sometimes though this loves verges on madness. This is a message to my daughters, Remember that I love you…madly (redact that, as surely I don’t want to scare them away.) Yes, remember that I love you.

Not For You My Dear

On the eve of my younger daughter's sixth birthday she was desperate to receive gifts, gifts and more gifts. Overwhelmed by the rampant consumerism our culture promotes, I thought I'd examine the desire to have stuff, how the psyche is affected when gifts are intended for someone else, the joy of receiving gifts, the joy of giving gifts, celebrations of life that don't require ownership of material belongings and what happens when someone else indulges in your gifts. I aspire to a simpler life unfettered by the burdens of stuff and yet am constantly sucked down the rabbit hole of desire.

1. Not For You My Dear.

2. Birthday Girl.

3. Her Nemesis.

4. Happy Birthday!

5. I'm Watching You.

6. Overcome by Desire.

7. I Didn't Do It.

8. The Culprit.

No Time For Scary Clowns (WIP)

Maternal Nature

As a girl I was a little lonely, a little obsessive and filled with a certain gapping longing for love. I imagined when I grew up I would, as a single mother, have a hundred children. Each would have long purple hair and dress entirely in shades of purple. I’d chauffeur them about in my beat up stretch purple limosine and we’d live in a ramshackle clapboard house with a rickety picket fence brimming with a raucous sort of love. Things have changed since then and my life didn’t turn out quite as unconventionally as I had hoped, but this desire to love and be loved has persisted as well as a certain sense of (often self-inflicted) loneliness. In Maternal Nature I have begun to explore the essence of unconditional love between a parent and a child, a sense of being both surrounded by beings and deeply alone, the awkwardness and self-possession of childhood and the comfort and self-exploration that can be found in a relationship with an inanimate object.

Garage Project

The Garage Project began in 2011 when, each morning, I would take my two small children and two large dogs on a long walk, exploring the alleys, streets and beach front of our town. I spent a lot of time in the alleys. Many of which were unpaved and had garages built in the late 1800. The garages that had not been rebuilt or otherwise enforced were tumble down sheds layered with peeling paint, a pallet of history. As we skipped through puddles, our boots muddy, I often felt transported back in time. Each shed had a story, one I wanted to capture and tell before it was lost to weather and time. And so began a journey of examining color and light, object and narrative. In the years since I began this project many of these garages have been torn down, rebuilt or rehabilitated. There were some I failed to capture before their disappearance and many I still do not know about, but this is a glimpse into a time and place, the seed of which has allowed me to imagine so many other stories.